32 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY28, 2022
PROFILES
LATE HARVEST
Wendell Berry renounced modernity sixty years ago, but his ideas have never been more pressing.
BY DOROTHYWICKENDEN
H
idden in the woods on a slope
above the Kentucky River, just
south of the Ohio border, is
a twelve-by-sixteen-foot cabin with a
long front porch. If not for the con-
crete pilings that raise the building high
off the ground, it would seem almost a
living part of the forest. Readers around
the world know the “long-legged house”
as the place where Wendell Berry, as a
twenty-nine-year-old married man with
two young children, found his voice.
As he explained in his essay by that
name, he built the cabin in the sum-
mer of 1963—a place where he could
write, read, and contemplate the lega-
cies of his forebears, and what inheri-
tance he might leave behind.
The cabin began as a log house built
by Berry’s great-great-great-grandfa-
ther Ben Perry, one of the area’s first
settlers, and it lived on as a multigen-
erational salvage operation. In the nine-
teen-twenties, with the original house
in disrepair, Wendell’s bachelor great-
uncle Curran Mathews painstakingly
took apart what remained and used the
lumber to make a camp along the Ken-
tucky River, where he could escape “the
bounds of the accepted.” Wendell, “a
melancholic and rebellious boy,” found
peace in the tumbledown camp, even
though it flooded every time the river
overflowed. Eventually, it became un-
inhabitable, and he pried off some pop-
lar and walnut boards to use in build-
ing his own cabin, on higher ground—a
“satisfactory nutshell of a house,” he
wrote. Standing on its long legs, it had
“a peering, aerial look, as though built
under the influence of trees.”
Berry, who is eighty-seven, has writ-
ten fifty-two books there—essays, po-
etry, short stories, and novels—most
of them while also running a farm,
teaching English at the University of
Kentucky, and engaging in political
protests. This summer, he’ll publish a
sprawling nonfiction book, “The Need
to Be Whole,” followed by a short-story
collection in the fall.
Last October, Berry showed me the
camp, asking only that I not say where
it is. Although he has laid bare his en-
tire life in print, he tightly guards his
privacy. The single room, containing an
antique woodstove against the back wall
and a neatly made cot in one corner,
was dominated by his worktable, set
before a forty-paned window—“the eye
of the house”—that looks out onto the
porch, the woods, and the river below.
The camp has no plumbing or elec-
tricity. Half a dozen well-sharpened
pencils were lined up on the worktable,
alongside small stacks of paper. On
top of one stack was a note Berry had
made, and crossed out, about Marianne
Moore’s poem “What Are Years?” Above
a small safe, curling photographs were
taped to a wall: Wallace Stegner, Er-
nest Gaines, Donald Hall and Jane Ken-
yon, Thomas Merton. Berry pointed
out a youthful shot of his wife, Tanya,
with cropped, wavy hair, striding along
a hillside by their house. He had made
a bird feeder and fastened it to the porch
railing, so he could watch the comings
and goings of chickadees, titmice, jun-
cos, and jays. I remembered a line from
“The Long-Legged House”: “One
bright warm day in November it was
so quiet that I could hear the fallen
leaves ticking, like a light rain, as they
dried and contracted, scraping their
points and edges against each other.”
The place was so inviting, I won-
dered if anyone had ever broken in—
seeking, perhaps, a little food and a fur-
tive night’s rest. “Yes, once,” Berry said.
He was pretty sure he knew the culprit.
“Someone took out a few panes and
tried to get into my safe. I wrote him a
note—‘Dear Thief, if you’re in trouble,
don’t tear this place up. Come to the
house, and I’ll give you what you need.’”
From this sliver of vanishing Amer-
ica, Berry cultivates the unfashionable
virtues of neighborliness and com-
passion. He divides his time between
writing and farmwork, continuing his
vocation of championing sustainable
agriculture in a country fuelled by in-
dustrial behemoths, while striving to
insure that rural Americans—a mocked,
despised, and ever-dwindling minor-
ity—do not perish altogether. When-
ever the country struggles with a new
man-made emergency, Berry is redis-
covered. A Twitter feed called @Wen-
dellDaily recently circulated one of his
maxims: “Rats and roaches live by com-
petition under the law of supply and
demand; it is the privilege of human
beings to live under the laws of justice
and mercy.”
Berry’s admirers call him an Isaiah-
like prophet. Michael Pollan and Alice
Waters say that he changed their lives
with five words: “Eating is an agricul-
tural act.” Pollan became a scourge of
the meat industry, genetically modified
food, and factory farms; Waters launched
the farm-to-table movement. The cul-
tural critic bell hooks, another Ken-
tuckian, began reading Berry in college,
finding his work “fundamentally radi-
cal and eclectic.” Decades later, she vis-
ited him at his farm to talk about the
importance of home and community
and the complexities of America’s ra-
cial divide.
Berry’s critics see him as a utopian
or a crank, a Luddite who never met a
technological innovation he admired. In
“Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Com-
puter,” an infamous 1987 essay that ran
in Harper’s, he announced, “I do not see
that computers are bringing us one step
nearer to anything that does matter
to me: peace, economic justice, ecolog-
ical health, political honesty, family and
community stability, good work.” When
indignant readers sent a blizzard of let-
ters to the editor, Berry noted in reply
that one man, who called him “a fool”
and “doubly a fool,” had “fortunately
